evening everyone I'm Jillian singers I have a great pleasure of being the Williams director here at the Museum and it gives me tremendous pleasure to say for the first time in 13 months welcome to the new Harrison auditorium over the last year as many of you know this historic space has been restored to its original splendor with important updates for the 21st century the beautiful colors of the glass divino tiles are revealed through careful cleaning the stage was completely rebuilt and we added air conditioning which I know we will all look forward to in the summer the many programs hosted in this space will be illuminated by the restored sour burst lighting fixture right here above you as well as new stage lighting there will be many renovations and restorations I hope you'll continue to discover for yourself as you return to this space where we are proud to host not only our own programs but with also partners around Philadelphia one change I think can't help but strike you as you'd sit here is the very chairs that you're sitting in they have been removed one by one and restored completely repainted reupholstered none of the improvements to the Harrison auditorium would have been possible without the superb generosity of donors who named seats for themselves for family members or in honor of someone and you'll see their names on the plaques throughout the auditorium these donors are our members our staff former Penn students Penn parents descendants of the auditorium's namesake Charles Custis Harrison and others with fond memories of the auditorium I am extremely grateful for them to help us make this a reality many of these naima seat tones and as well as their honorees are here with us tonight and I would like to give them a round of applause for their support [Applause] now these renovations to the Harrison auditorium were an important part of the first phase of our building transformation project which has utterly transformed our main level with our reimagine galleries there which of course started with the galleries of Middle East last year if you have yet had a chance to explore a new Sphynx gallery Mexico and said for America gallery as well as our African galleries I urge you to do so so our great lectures are a highlight of the museum programming every year and this year is great catastrophe series no exception although I wondered at the appropriateness of just launching a new museum with the catastrophe in it we are thrilled that this series can now return to this auditorium and I'm also really pleased to have all of you here with us tonight and it is my great pleasure to introduce my good friend and colleague the preeminent archeologist dr. Brian Rose brian is the curator in charge of a Mediterranean section and the James B Pritchard professor of archaeology in Penn's Classical Studies department Brown received his PhD in art history and archeology from Columbia University he is the director of the Gordian excavation project the museum's longest-running excavation and the head of the post Bronze Age excavations at Troy his publications about Troy and Gordian Fork focus on the political and artistic relationship between Rome and the provinces for nearly a decade Brian has also offered pre-deployment education and training for armed forces personnel bound for Iraq and Afghanistan he currently serves on the Advisory Council of the Iraqi Institute for the conservation of Antiquities and heritage and the board of directors for the Council of American overseas research centers brian has also served as the president of the archaeological Institute of America is vice president of the American Research Institute in Turkey and also a trustee of the American Academy in Rome he received the extremely prestigious gold medal of the archaeological Institute of America in 2015 and was also elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in addition Brian has received fellowships for many prestigious institution and also manages to find time to teach extremely popular courses in the art and archaeology of the Mediterranean world and what you perhaps do not know is Brian also has a beautiful singing voice and plays a mean guitar and if you don't believe me I urge you to go to the YouTube channel where you will see him perform in our galleries tonight he will be presenting blacker and denser than any other night the destruction of Pompeii and it's aftermath please join me in welcoming Brian you Thank You Julian and it's wonderful to see so many of you here to celebrate not just the opening of the Harrison auditorium but also the destruction of Pompeii which will be the focus of the talk tonight what I would like to do is initially to contextualize the history and archaeology of Pompeii and the surrounding cities then we will look at the destruction itself what we can reconstruct of the destruction and then to look at the aftermath of that destruction how was the excavation of Pompeii received in the 18th 19th 20th and early 21st centuries what have we learned about it in the course of the last 250 years of research so we'll be looking at an area that lies a hundred and fifty miles south of Rome and we'll be looking primarily at Pompeii although on occasion at its neighboring city of Herculaneum both of which were destroyed by Mount Vesuvius probably on October 24th 79 AD a later date than we have thought and I'll say more about that later we're fortunate in knowing a great deal about the eruption and about the destruction because we have an eyewitness account of someone who actually watched the destruction of the cities in 79 AD even though he wrote about it more than 25 years later but the letter in the two letters in which he described the destruction of Pompeii still survived and we will treat those as well the two cities are different in a number of respects Pompeii probably had a population of about 12,000 although it's difficult to be certain of course not all of it has been excavated Herculaneum was smaller maybe five or 6,000 digging at the two cities is different in that Pompeii lies under about 20 meters of ash pumice rock etc it relies under lies about five meters five meters under rock and ash and Herculaneum is under 20 meters of rock and ash and pumice so it's easier to dig at Pompeii because you've only got five meters of deposits above the ancient city Herculaneum you have 20 meters above the ancient city as well as the modern city of Herculaneum which is why only about 25% of Herculaneum has been excavated versus about two-thirds of Pompeii we don't actually know where the name Pompeii comes from it could be an Austen word the oskins were were the with the language of a native italic people living here probably in the sixth century BC which is when we get our earliest remains here the same is probably true of Herculaneum the name of Herculaneum however certainly comes from Hercules or Heracles in Greek who was a hero who moved through this area and indeed through Rome at some point in the Bronze Age so Hercules was always one of the primary deities of this area now we know a great deal about ancient Roman life because of the excavations in these cities we not only know how they lived and what the decoration of their houses looked like what their bakeries were like what the bank banking system was like what the bankers were like how they fought in the amphitheatre but we also know how they died because when the city was excavated in the 19th century the director of the Naples Archaeological Museum realized that he could pour plaster in the cavities left by the decomposed bodies and see exactly what they had looked like at the moment of their death so we have a perspective on pompeii that we have on no other ancient roman city what we know especially is how they lived in their houses and i want to start out with housing in pompeii because that really is something that we can reconstruct with a great deal of certainty and in minut detail we close our doors when we're not home or when we are home we close our doors they didn't close their doors during the day they left their doors open to the street because they wanted people to see how long the line of petitioners was so people would come to these wealthy houses to ask the paterfamilias the owner of the house for favors possibly economic possibly social possibly political but they would ask him for favors and that man would want his neighbors to see how long the line of petitioners was so you needed to leave the door open in order for that to happen so it was a different attitude toward privacy than we have now one would have gone through the doorway into the atrium about which I'll say a great deal more later then into ateb Lynam a kind of living room and then into a peristyle garden the garden surrounded by columns sometimes if you had enough money there were two of these and sometimes even three and I'll say more about that again in time now the entrance to the house what sort of message did you want to convey to those who were approaching your door for the first time it's a different kind of message than we typically convey to those who approach our doors so this is one of the wealthy houses in Pompeii the so called house of the Vettii and you see here a God from the east you see he's wearing the eastern or Phrygian cap his name is pre APUs and it won't have escaped your attention that he is particularly noteworthy for the size of his phallus and just in case you didn't understand how heavy it was you can see it's being weighed against a sack of gold coins over here and they're at equal weight and it's also working as a directional arrow directing your eyes toward this basket of fruit and that's important to keep in mind it's not intended as a sexual joke it is now if you go to Pompeii but in antiquity it was not it was intended to signal the prosperity of the household more such symbols of prosperity are found in other houses at Pompeii with the fali getting larger and larger to signal the increasing prosperity of these houses they were also intended to be what we call a Potro paying warding off evil keeping evil at bay now you could do that in a variety of ways the evil that you were keeping at bay by the way was often anthropomorphised as an eye so the evil eye and we still have that of course people avoid stepping on cracks they avoid black cats they avoid walking under ladders many buildings don't have a 13th floor and why is that because it's bad luck and what does that mean it means that if you aren't careful the evil I could do something terrible to you so some demonic agent could cause you misfortune and they had the same sort of fear in antiquity here you see the evil eye rarely do we get the evil eye personified but you see it here this is actually not from Pompeii it's from a city in what is now southeastern Turkey but it's being attacked by everything under the Sun you have a raven a trident a scorpion a dog a snake and a dwarf whose penis goes under between his legs and back to look at as it were it has little eyes to look at the evil eye so as to keep it at bay so there were a number of these apotropaic devices at the entrance to the house as well as the old-fashioned technique of beware of the dog so you'll find these in a number of houses mosaics with the dog and with the inscription colwich on em beware of the dog that's one of the few things that they did that we still do now when you went into the atrium this was where you showed what kind of family you came from you were placed in the context of your family your ancestors were signaled for special prominence and ideally you wanted to be able to trace your ancestry all the way back to the Trojan War to the hero Aeneas who would escape the burning city of Troy prior to its destruction made his way to central Italy and served as the founder of the Roman people or even to the gods so as you went into the atrium you would often find genealogical charts on the wall not so different from the genealogical charts that we create for our own families and you would also have seen busts and masks of your ancestors the masks would have been in wax and these would actually have been molded from the faces of members of your family when they were probably between the ages of 35 and 40 so if you are rising up in political office you've reached the age of 35 you've become a so-called Edel AE di le then you would have the right to have a wax mask made of your face so it was made while you were alive we call them death masks only because they would later be worn in funerals after you would died but they're modeled from your face while you're still alive and so there would have been cabinets all around the atrium with these wax masks of the ancestors each mask relating to a name that would have been signaled in one of these genealogical charts now I always wondered how you make one of these masks because we don't we have I think two of them they're made of wax and so they don't survive very well as you can imagine and the nice thing about pen is that you can be creative in your teaching so what I did was to invite the wife of Julian sigar's the director of our museum Marianne loving a wonderful sculptor and artist in her own right to come to my seminar on ancient Rome and to make wax masks of everyone including me so that we could get an idea of how it was done this is really very easy to do you could even try it at home with nothing going wrong I dare say so you can even use the ancient materials you take strips of linen you soak them in plaster you put them on your face after you've shaven yeah this is key shave first coat your face with olive oil and then put the linen strip soaked and plaster on your face that will harden into a mold a mask and a mold and then you would paint melted wax on the interior of the plaster mold let that harden pull out the wax which would now be a mask from the plaster mold this is me by the way as you've already gathered that and then you paint it because the ancient writers tell us that these masks were extremely lifelike and then you have an exact copy of your face that would have gone in one of these wax cabinets and then when one of these cabinets for the wax masks then later on long after you were dead when someone in your family was celebrating a funeral that wax mask of you would come out it would be worn by someone in your family who had the same stature the same build as you did and so they would all march across the forum or wherever the funeral was happening wearing these masks and I know what you're thinking you're thinking that everyone would then have looked like an axe murderer and perhaps that's true but the as I do here but the whole idea was to get the encyclopedic expanse of your family you're a complete ancestry on display anytime someone in the family dies and all of this was being signaled in the atrium now what about the dining room we know a lot about dining and food and recipes and eating because of the excavations at Pompeii we also of course have bakeries that have been excavated we have over thirty bakeries I think the last count is 34 bakeries which are scattered all over the city and here too and the bakeries you have fallow this is not the actual phallus from this particular bakery but there is a phallus carved on the oven with the inscription happiness lives here and it's not it's not referring to romantic interludes between baking spells it's simply an indication of the prosperity that envelops the bakery in one of these bakeries there were over 80 loaves of bread that had just been baked and of course that no one would have eaten because that was the day that Mount Vesuvius erupted and they were stamped as well these bakeries were run by slaves so it's not surprising to see it stamped by a slave property of Keller slave of granny as Farris now in addition to the bread what else was going on some of these bakeries were in the catering business as well and we also have a cookbook from the fourth or fifth century AD which purports to be a copy of the recipes of a gourmet named Apicius who allegedly lived in the 1st century AD so a kind of Julia Child or galloping gourmet from 2,000 years ago and so we have his recipes and we also have a wonderful novel called called the Satyricon written by a roman writer named Petronius which many of you have read which also gives us recipes and so one of the most distinctive is the dormice recipe dip dormice in honey and sprinkle with poppy seeds or stuff them or crush them with pepper nuts fennel and fish sauce or gharam and these dormice were kept in special containers that have actually been excavated at Pompeii they're called each one is called a gloriam or Gloria a dormouse holder I know this is sort of pathetic these were these were ceramic jars with spiral running tracks on the interior so that the Dormouse had something to do when it was kept in this container so they would put food in so that the dormouse would get fatter and the Dormouse would run around not too much because they wanted it to get fat not trained for the Olympics and so ultimately when the Dormouse was fat enough they would take it out and follow the recipe here now these dining spectacles were truly spectacles and we have some of the vessels that highlight how epicurean they could be literally epicurean these are two cups two silver cups or a silver cup from Bosco Royale a there are many other silver cups that have been excavated there as well with skeletons celebrating at a banquet and the inscription enjoy life while you can for tomorrow is uncertain which is of course a very poignant expression especially for Pompeii because life truly was uncertain and the skeletons all have names as you see so you have philosophers Epicurus Zeno Euripides Sophocles all the great men of the past were saying it's okay to drink to excess because who knows what tomorrow may bring and in some of the mosaics we even have skeletons who were dining and you'll remember from one chapter of Petronius as Satyricon tromo Kyo has a magnificent feast and he actually has a silver skeleton deposited on the banqueting table now after you dined you had consumed an enormous amount of wine you would go into the peristyle garden and continue celebrating you notice the distinctive thing about many of these peristyle Gardens the lower part of the columns sorry the lower part of the columns is unfair to that's to say these vertical depressions that you have on the upper part of the column which we call flutes are not represented on the lower parts of the column here or here or indeed in most houses in Pompeii and why would that be because no one wanted to repair their broken fluting so at a drinking party people are gonna get knocked against columns they're gonna break off the flutes and this is plaster so it's gonna break and then you've got a costly repair job on your hands but if you only flute above danger then you don't have to worry about repairing anything this was a technique that was first developed in school rooms in Western Asia Minor in the second century BC as you can imagine school rooms were a big problem and so they started making columns where they would flute above puberty they would flute only where it was safe no one was even if you threw a child against the columns the flutes wouldn't get knocked off and ultimately those spread throughout houses of the Mediterranean and they become a decorative feature in their own right so some of you will have seen such a technique in the buildings of Philadelphia one example will have been this one City Hall where you have the lower part this is the top of City Hall so there's not going to be a drinking party and no one's going to class up here but nevertheless the lower part of the columns are still in fluted following the technique that was used so extensively at Pompeii these peristyle courts would be decorated with elaborate sculpture many of which have been excavated in the houses themselves now they had a very clear idea of what they liked and what they didn't like in ancient Rome there is a writer whom we will discuss a little later named Pliny plenti the elder who said in 296 BCE art stopped and so if you're gonna collect art collect art of the 5th and 4th century BC because it stopped at 300 BC so there were plenty of art critics already in the ancient Roman world and to collect that art meant patronizing the art market or patronizing or a lying yourself with someone who could loo decide in Greece where those sculptures of 5th and 4th century BC date were still to be found and we find some of these tattoos in shipwrecks that are being transferred are being shipped from Greece to Italy and then the ships somewhere around the coast of Italy and the most prominent examples this is from the early 80s from the site of Rio che in southern Italy where just under the water these were not deeply buried there were two statues that were found you see them here in the conservation lab and then here one of them after the conservation had been completed these day to about 450 BC someone will have plundered them or they will have been sold by a city that was hard on its luck to someone in the art market and they would gradually have gone on ship to Italy only to be sunk here but had they not been sunken they would have gone into a peristyle Court for decoration what is off these peristyle courts elaborate mosaic floors and some of them have a political theme many of you are familiar with the Alexander mosaic from the house of the faun this was originally a wall painting that celebrates the victory of Alexander the Great on his horse Bucephalus here over the Persian King Darius this is probably the Battle of Issus in the late 4th century BC so originally a wall painting which is copied as a floor mosaic in the late second century BC now in the 2nd century BC the Romans had been steadily fighting the Macedonians the region of northeastern Greece which is the area from which Alexander the Great had come so the Macedonians have become the enemy and the other enemy were the Parthian the successors of the Persians whom you see signaled out over here with these elaborate tiaras so you have two enemies that are highlighted in this mosaic on the one hand you're copying a masterpiece from 300 BC on the other hand you're calling to mind the two great enemies of the Roman people in the 2nd and 1st centuries BC the Macedonians and the Parthian the descendants of the Persians copied from a wall mosaic to a wall painting to a floor mode so that you would actually walk on the heads of Alexander and the Persian king and in walking on the heads of Alexander in the Persian King you were walking on the heads of your enemies the Macedonians and the Parthian we tend to think that this is something that we don't do anymore and we don't do it here in this country but it is still done the most prominent example I know of that's analogous to this kind of act would be in Baghdad the vestibule of the Al Rashid hotel after the first Gulf War what Saddam Hussein did was to go to the vestibule of this five-star hotel and install a mosaic of George Bush from the early 1990s so that everyone but everyone who came into the hotel had to walk on the head of George Bush upon entering the hotel not unlike the rest of the people in the house of the faun and pompay would walk on the heads of the Persians and the Macedonians this of course has now been taken away as you can imagine but it's the same sort of idea many of these people were literate and they wanted you to know that by the decoration of their homes so we see them grasping strolls scrolls or with dip --tx wax tablets holding a stylus and the same sort of thing over here and they would emphasize literacy for both the men and the women in the family we have about 10,000 pieces of writing that have been found at Pompeii so probably far more people were literate than we think now sometimes we have a lot of writing that still survives this is from the house of the banker Elias you kunda see where we have in his attic a hundred and fifty banking records thirty-five years of banking records that were abandoned there and here you see one of these wax tablets they would write in the wax and then once you had finished it you would close the diptych and it would go into the attic we also have plenty of slogans that adorn the houses of Pompeii there was a great deal of advertising not just political advertising but advertising by donors now in a sense I suppose we still have this this auditorium is filled with your names because you are donors and the same sort of thing happened in Pompeii in this particular example this poster of Lucretia sacra is Valens whom you see here what he's saying is I'm giving the games this weekend and I'm giving you 20 pairs of gladiators and my son is giving you 10 pairs of gladiators and we're paying for awnings to be installed over the amphitheater and wild beast combats so how about that so therefore vote for me for Co mayor of the city these are all over the town now sometimes we have an unusually large number of Scrolls that still survived the most prominent example of which would be the so called villa of the papyri the house of Calpurnia spies Oh Julius Caesar's father-in-law you see a part of it excavated here a reproduction of that house you know as the getty villa in malibu california so jay paul Getty simply copied the villa of the papyri for his villa in malibu and that villa when it was excavated yield an unusually large number of bronze sculptures replicas of which we have in this museum you see one of them here and if you were to go to the courtyard entrance the treasure entrance you would see a number of additional copies of these bronze sculptures that showed up here now what's astounding is that we have a series of boxes that contain the papyrus scrolls of a library and they are the writings of a man named Phil a philosopher named Phil Adiemus of Ghidorah Ghidorah is in northern Jordan and this was a man who lived in the first century BC there are over 18 hundred of these Scrolls which are of course burned because of the destruction of Herculaneum which is where this villa is located and unrolling burned Scrolls of this sort as the conservators in this room will tell you is no mean feat and many of them were destroyed in the attempt but now with multi spectral imaging we can determine the writing more easily than ever before because the chemical configuration of the writing of the ink is very different from the soot the blackness that surrounds the ink so we're reading more and more of these Scrolls every day all of them are from the writing of Philadelphia Dhara who is frankly not the most interesting writer who ever lived he was an epicurean philosopher but nevertheless we have a whole library of the man's writings and it's not unlikely that is more of Herculaneum as excavated in the future as I said only 25% has been excavated more and more of these libraries will one day be found although it may be a century or two before they're actually found and some of the objects in and around these libraries show the patrons of the houses as people of the world because they have imports from far-flung areas one of the most prominent examples is this ivory statue wet which comes from beau Cardin in central India it's only 25 centimeters high made of ivory it's actually nude although you don't see that she's nude because she has this heavy beaded necklace and heavy anklets as well as bracelets and you can see she has two attendants on either side this is probably a part of a piece of wooden furniture but it gives you an idea of how extensive the trade networks were in the first century AD and this is one of several that have come from India at Pompeii now what I've been showing you are the lifestyles of the rich and famous what if you didn't have a lot of money if you were wealthy and you were interested in sexual activity with someone of than your spouse you simply slept with your slave that's what was done but those in the lower classes or lower middle classes would go to the brothels many would say that there are many brothels at Pompeii there in fact is only one brothel that we feel we can be certain of it's near one of the baths the stabian baths and it is hardly well-appointed I mean it is I suppose as far as brothels go but you have a masonry couch here now so this would have had a straw mattress on a stone couch there was a little lavatory with a curtain to the side and erotic paintings that adorned the walls some will also say you'll hear this from some of the guides in Pompeii that every time you see a penis carved in stone that's pointing the way to a brothel that's perfectly ridiculous as you know by now these are simply a sign of abundance of fertility and there apotropaic in function so you're in the middle classes the lower classes you would go to her bravo you would go to the baths and then you would go to the amphitheater to watch these gladiatorial games that say Trias valence had paid for this is the oldest stone amphitheatre that has ever been found dating to roughly 80 BC and probably built right after pompeii becomes a Roman colony which is around 80 BC we hear a lot about this amphitheater because of the battles that happened here were the fights I should say that happened here there's a famous painting from 59 ad that refers to an episode that we also know about from the writings about the entertainment life of ancient Pompeii there with these games there were of course teams and people would root for different teams and sometimes things would get out of control in the way that they still do and so there was a horrible fight between the Pompeians and the new carians at one of these games and so the Senate of Rome forebay anymore gladiatorial games for a 10-year period a tenure moratorium on gladiatorial games because the people behaved like animals at sporting events now the people and that also hasn't changed necessarily depending upon what you're focused on but certainly not Philadelphia these these wealthy patrons who were paying for the games also held other offices in the city here is an example of one of them Marcus holconius Rufus from the early first century AD he was military Tribune by popular demand and had been due a we're Co mayor of the city of Pompeii five times and so the city wanted to set up a statue of him that would celebrate his beneficence his his magnificent benefactions to the city and of course since he was military Tribune he's presented here in a military guys with a military breastplate and with two Griffins on the front of that breastplate now if you look carefully at the statue does anything look strange about this to you yes he's a pinhead you've already noted that the head is too small for the body and what happens to make that occur this is something that you'll find throughout ancient Roman sculpture if you've got a statue of someone let's say Caligula who reigned from 37 to 41 who was fallen out of favor and his portraits are slated for destruction why bother destroying it you could simply cut it into the portrait of somebody else and put it in a pre-existing statue type like this one all you need to do is add some wrinkles around some crow's feet around the eyes wrinkles on the brow a few horizontal lines lines on either side of the of the mouth you cut back some of the hair and you have holconius Rufus from the statue of Caligula and you didn't have to pay much at all because you're just editing a Prius portrait and that works fine except when you put it on the body it does make your patron look like a pinhead so that sort of defeats the purpose of the honorific statue but nevertheless they did it repeatedly throughout ancient Rome they didn't like to waste marble if they didn't have to now there were signs of disaster in Pompeii already in 1662 AD there was a terrible earthquake that we see depicted on a relief from the household shrine in the house of Elias you kunda see the banker who had all those banking records in his attic and you see the building's tilting this is the capitolium the temple of Jupiter Juno and Minerva in the center of Pompeii and you see two equestrian statues on either side and someone making a sacrifice here but the the buildings are clearly they have been damaged in the earthquake and some of the buildings were still not repaired when disaster struck in 79 AD when this happened when the earthquake happened there was some relief from Rome but Rome had its own problems that would be the Great Fire of 64 AD coming two years after Pompey's earthquake you all know about this fire where Nero fiddled while Rome burned allegedly this of course is Peter Ustinov not at Nero but it really is the same thing so a great tract of central Rome was destroyed and that hindered Rome's ability to assist other cities that had been damaged by natural disasters now when we move forward to 79 AD it looks as if there had been tremors where there had been some sign that disaster was on the horizon a number of buildings had been damaged conceivably in tremors in the past two months because in some of the houses we find buckets of mosaic tesserae little cubes of mosaic that are intended to repair mosaics buckets of sand buckets of lime clearly they're repairing struck that had recently been damaged none of them was prepared for what would happen on what is probably October 24th 79 AD when Mount Vesuvius would erupt none of them in this area had seen an eruption like this the last time Mount Vesuvius had erupted in any kind of major way was 1,500 years earlier so that's in the Bronze Age in the second millennium BC and so when it erupted they weren't quite sure what was happening we get an extensive description of this two letters in fact from a writer named Pliny the Younger who was a witness to this disaster in 79 AD was unharmed by the disaster because he was witnessing it from across the Bay of Naples at the age of 18 his uncle Pliny the Elder who was the commander of the naval fleet in the area and also a great writer he wrote an encyclopedia of natural history which probably some of you have read he wanted to go off to help friends of his who who petitioned to him for assistance and also to observe what was happening because he would had written this encyclopedia of natural history so he went off and ultimately was killed as plenty the younger watched it all happen from the safe point of Messina 35 kilometers west of Vesuvius now he watched all of this happen when he was 18 years old he didn't write it down for another even more than 25 years probably not until 106 107 a.d when he wrote to the historian Tacitus about what had happened but it is nevertheless an eyewitness account so he's the one who refers to the day not the night but the actual day as blacker and denser than any ordinary night because the eruption starts in the afternoon continues through the evening and the night and less than 24 hours later it's all done and life in the towns have been extinguished so he refers to the shrieks of the residents of the city and mentions that many sought the aid of the gods others wondered whether there were any gods who still survived and he felt that the entire world was dying these are very moving letters that describe the destruction of a whole area even though he doesn't specifically name Pompeii and Herculaneum now this is a chart that will take you through the destruction in early afternoon pumice begins to fall on Pompeii and we're not talking just a little bit of pumice we're talking over a hundred million tons of pumice as the evening as the afternoon progresses now this is all falling on the roofs of Pompeii which are sturdy well-built houses but nothing is going to withstand the weight of that much pumice and then in the course of the evening late evening night and overnight we get pyroclastic eruptions pyroclastic surges so molten rock and ash poisonous gases all enveloping Pompeii and Herculaneum and so by early the next morning it's done we estimate that about 60 to 62 percent of the population died because of the pyroclastic eruptions enveloping the city and probably a little over a third 38% died because they sought shelter in their homes and the roof collapsed under the weight of all of this pumice we can also put it in context now Vesuvius eruption produced about four cubic kilometers of ejected material if we compare that with thira or santorini in the late 17th century BC 60 cubic kilometers of ejected material so as bad as it was the Mediterranean had seen far worse many of you have been to fira or Santorini as you see here the entire interior of the island sank beneath the waves and this is often associated with the myth of Atlantis which of course in the story sinks beneath the waves we can also compare it with more modern disasters here you see the Sioux vyas far worse than the eruption of Mount st. Helens in 1980 in southern Washington state where 57 people died but far less serious than what we find at Krakatoa in 1883 which was two truly catastrophic now in the course of excavations which start in the middle of the 18th century they found the cavities left by decomposed bodies and Giuseppe Fiorello the director of the Naples Archaeological Museum in 1860 realizes that he can pour plaster in these cavities and get an exact replica of what people were doing at the moment when they died were they grabbing their spouses their children their life savings combination of both we find all of these what do you grab when you know that life your life your family's life is about to be extinguished these of course have become Museum objects in their own right and are often used for traveling exhibits even in the 18th and 19th primarily the 19th century when people were contemplating these one of the women who was on the Grand Tour said how dreadful that those of us who today are spectators of these plaster casts may become spectacles to travelers of the succeeding century so she saw herself potentially in these plaster casts some people and some things of course couldn't get away many of the dogs were chained and died still on their chains some of the slaves were chained and died on their chains more recently there have been many more attempts to understand the bodies of those excavated in Pompeii by using special scanners to see the bones the skeletons that are contained within the plaster casts you're seeing one example of this here Stefano Vanacore a the director of the Pompeii site laboratory who has just scanned 86 bodies you see him holding the body of a four year old Pompeii and child who has been scanned and then the results of that scanning it's taught us a great deal about the lives of the Pompeii ins which we can learn from analysis of the skeleton that says Janet Monge surely will tell you in you were the lunch with a curator which he's having later in December with some of these bodies from Pompeii they looked like they let a relatively healthy life low sugar high fiber relatively secure but every area where we analyzed the skeletons is a little different now here's another area altogether which yielded more skeletons than we would ever have expected this takes us back to Herculaneum and to the boat houses which you see here for a long time no one found any bodies in Herculaneum and the general assumption was that everybody got away but in the early 1980s the boat houses were excavated and they found the bodies ultimately of up to 300 people from Herculaneum who were waiting for help that never came and so this has increased our knowledge of life at Herculaneum in an extraordinary way altogether we have about 1,100 bodies from Pompeii and about 350 from Herculaneum but we have them from other parts to a Plautus is yet another city in the general area that was destroyed in the eruption of Vesuvius this was some sort of Emporium probably connected to wine production and it was found during the construction of a school we make some of our best discoveries when modern developers come in and start building new buildings this is especially true in Rome with the excavation for the new subway line line see that has yielded some of the best discoveries we could ever have hoped for and the same is true for Istanbul and for Athens whenever the subway people come in to dig the subways unfortunately this is the Mediterranean so the archaeologists have enough power to say to the developers go away I'll call you back when it's published and when it's completely excavated in any event in digging this area Villa B the Emporium at a plantus they found 54 bodies that were divided into two groups one group had a lot of money and a lot of jewelry and one group had no money and no jewelry so we've generally assumed that there was a difference in social class here they were all sheltered together but they were sheltered by class the rich people on one side the poor people and/or the slaves on the other side you can see one of the strong boxes from this Emporium which is wood surrounded by iron decoration that was excavated in the complex within this group of skeletons were twins the bodies of twins between the ages of 10 and 12 which had congenital syphilis so syphilis goes all the way back 2,000 years many had thought that it first came to Europe with the crewmen of Christopher Columbus having brought it from the new world but clearly it goes all the way back to antiquity now I've referred several times to the date of the eruption plenty the younger says that it was August 24th 79 AD and this is what we thought until last year when a new house was excavated which had an inscription written in charcoal this is from a house that was being repaired at the time of the eruption I refer to the amount of repair that was going on in the city and it refers to 16 days before the Kalends of November so October 17th you see it right here this is charcoal lightly incised on the wall to indicate when the repair was happening so it had to be after October 17th and charcoal is not going to last very long this is a temporary label just to tell the workman what had been done and when it had been done so the general assumption now is that probably the eruption happened a week after this that the ancient that plenty had it off by two months not August 24th but rather October 24th and keep in mind that when Pliny writes his eyewitness account of the event it's written more than 25 years after the event had actually occurred and this works well with what we found in the excavations of Pompeii more recently where people are wearing heavier clothing the clothing that you would wear in in late October that you wouldn't wear in August and that also fits the profile of the kinds of fruits which are autumnal fruits that have been found in the excavation not the fruits that you would find in August now did anybody come to help after the eruption no Rome had its own problems so by the time word had reached Rome that Pompeii and Herculaneum and the entire campaign Ian region was in trouble it was too late and right after the destruction in Pompeii and Herculaneum we have yet another cataclysmic fire that's sweeping through Rome during the reign of the emperor Titus whom you see here so no one is beating a path from Rome to Pompeii to try to reconstruct the city or to build it anew no one is beating a path there except the looters so we have tunnels moving into Pompeii and Herculaneum with coins from the 1st through the 4th centuries ad so the looters knew what was there they knew what they stood to gain and they tunneled in to get it as looters will tend to do what were they hoping for jewelry probably as well as whatever coins they could find this isn't one of the graves that was found by the looters but it's what the looters would have hoped to have found this is the so-called ring lady from the boat houses of Herculaneum and you can see the Rings and the bracelets that she's wearing emeralds rubies gold all of this was there for the taking if you could tunnel through 50 or 20 of five or 20 meters of rock and pumice and ash now the site is first discovered again while digging a water channel in the late 16th century but major excavations don't really start until the middle of the 18th century during the reign of Charles the seventh King of Naples and Sicily who was really interested in decorating his palaces and what better way to decorate your palace than to pull the bronze sculpture from Pompeii Herculaneum and the surrounding cities so we get extensive excavation starting now but it's really treasure hunting more than something that you would actually call excavation this is of course a watershed moment in Europe really pushing the neoclassical movement to the fore it sparks the introduction of the Grand Tour where aristocratic men primarily men from London and Paris would go to rome and pompeii and Athens and Constantinople to look at the wonders from the ancient world that were steadily being discovered in the course of the second half of the 18th century and you can see these wonders highlighted in paintings that would adorn artist studios such as this one from panini in the second half of the 18th century and that's also when we get our first public museums the Vatican the British Museum the Louvre they're all being open to the public being established and open to the public in the second half of the 18th century in the wake of this massive excavation of Pompeii and Herculaneum and so as they were digging Pompeii and Herculaneum what were they finding penises and they weren't expecting to find that and so when Francis the first the king of the Two Sicilies comes to power he realizes that something has to be done because there's too much erotic sculpture and painting coming out of the excavations of Pompeii so he establishes this special room the Gabi Neto secreto in the Vatican where all the erotic art would go and it was to be opened only two men and opened only two men of the finest moral character only they could see the images that were coming from Pompeii and that is no longer the case everybody whether male or female whether upstanding characters or bottom-of-the-barrel you can all go in that room but that room still exists as the Gabi Neto segreto meanwhile the tourists continue to come in the set throughout the 19th century especially after these plaster casts are made of the cavities in Pompeii and they even build a funicular up to Mount Vesuvius for the tourists and you're all familiar with this the funiculars introduction in 1884 which a new song was written funiculi funicula celebrating that funicular to the top of vesuvius meanwhile in the middle of the nineteenth century not all is going well in Italy the French are attacking Rome in 18-49 this is in the middle of giuseppe garibaldi z' attempt to reunite or to unite Italy under one banner as the country of Italy and the French come in in a way to assist the papacy which is which since the Pope has been pushed out in this nascent Republican effort and so there's an exodus of great artists in the middle of the nineteenth century trying to get away after the French attack one of whom is Constantine Brumidi who comes to Washington and he has observed the paintings of Pompeii and all of the representations of the leaders of Pompeii so he's commissioned to paint the apotheosis of George Washington on the underside of the Dome of the Capitol and also to decorate the naval affairs committee room and you see what he's done he's simply taken this mean ad this assistant of Dionysus who's carrying a staff topped with a pinecone and he simply shifted that so that she's carrying the American flag but otherwise it's exactly the same so we get little Pompeii developing in Washington as a result of these emigres artists the site suffers even more consistently in the middle of the 20th century especially during World War two when there are over a hundred fifty allied bombs that fall on Pompeii badly damaging Pompeii and of course destroying the abbey of Monte Cassino 80 miles south of Rome which gives rise to the so called Hague Convention during the during the presidency of Dwight Eisenhower and right after all of these bombs explode in Pompeii Vesuvius erupts again in 1944 disturbing that not disturbing destroying the funicular so no one is singing funiculi funicula anymore at that point but there's all of this destruction which is something that we're still wrestling with and of course one of the problems with with the economy roaring in certain countries is that the amount of tourism in Italy has skyrocketed and so we hear more and more about statues in and around Pompeii that are destroyed antiquities that are stolen and buildings that are falling down because there just isn't enough money to pay the guards for the upkeep and this became a scandal relatively recently and so after 2012 the EU pledged over a hundred million euros to conserve the site of Pompeii and the surrounding area and it is now of course receiving an enormous amount of conservation that it never received before by way of conclusion I just wanted to highlight what Pompeii is being used for now how you find these casts being employed and how you find the city being memorialized in exhibits this is one commemorating the destruction of the eruption of Mount st. Helens in 1980 at the Cleveland Museum of Art in 2013 where the plaster casts were brought in to place the eruption of a and the eruption of Mount st. Helens side-by-side you also get sculptors such as anthony gormley the British sculptor anthony gormley creating images that are modeled on the plaster casts of Pompeii this being a case in point critical mass this is an exhibit that went to the museums in Bosnia as a way of placing side-by-side the horrific loss of life in Bosnia with the equally horrific loss of life after the eruption of Mount Vesuvius and of course Hollywood gets into the mix as well in the early 20th century we get the last days of Pompeii which essentially says the people in Pompeii were wicked and so Mount Vesuvius erupts to punish them and only the Christians got away because they were virtuous that's basically the theme of the movie then if we go to the late 1950s you get Spartacus about the injustice 'as visited upon the slaves of Rome in the first century BC and their struggle for greater justice this is being done right after Rosa Parks refuses to give her seat up on the bus and civil rights are becoming an issue of conversation throughout the nation and indeed throughout the world and this is a kind of ancient commentary on this burgeoning social phenomenon if you look around now you see Pompeii Konoe ting the concept of wealth whether it's Caesar's Palace or Pompeii and facades used for Gucci stores or the recreation of the villa of the papyri and Herculaneum for the villa of Jay paul Getty so I hope as you've listened to this lecture you've gotten a sense that Pompeii is not just a city that was destroyed 2,000 years ago it really is a concept not unlike Troy that can easily be molded and recontextualized without much difficulty to make a more powerful statement about religion about society about race about wealth and about the tragedy by natural disaster and by war and that I suppose is what makes it timeless thank you for listening to me tonight thank you for your support of the museum [Applause]
